Author: TechBrunch

As regular readers of TechCrunch know, 2024, like the years before it, was filled with data breaches, ransomware attacks, and massive hacks that exploited the most trivial of software vulnerabilities. Even the most well-resourced organizations have been unable to keep hackers from infiltrating their systems over the past 12 months. AT&T experienced its second major breach this year, this time affecting “nearly all of its customers.” Ticketmaster allegedly had 560 million records stolen in a hack by cloud storage giant Snowflake. Additionally, health insurance giant Change Healthcare was hit with a ransomware attack that accessed sensitive medical information on at…

India has lifted restrictions on WhatsApp's payment services, a major win for Meta by users in its biggest market as the social media giant looks to compete with stalwart fintech rivals. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the payments agency that oversees the popular instant payments rail called UPI, announced on Tuesday that WhatsApp can now roll out WhatsApp Pay to all users in the market. WhatsApp has over 500 million users in India. This decision removes the previous 100 million user cap on WhatsApp Pay. The move signals a shift in regulators' cautious approach to WhatsApp's payments ambitions. NPCI,…

Asset management firm Fidelity last month cut the estimated value of its stake in business messaging platform Gupushyap by a further 7.7%, reducing the value of its holding in the SaaS startup by more than 65% in total since its investment in mid-2021. One of the funds managed by the U.S. asset management company valued its holdings in Gapshap at $5.62 million at the end of November, down from $6.09 million in October, according to monthly disclosures. Fidelity originally invested $16.2 million from Gupshap's Blue Chip Growth Fund in mid-2021 in a funding round that valued the San Francisco-based startup…

TikTok's parent company ByteDance has big plans to buy Nvidia chips in 2025, despite US restrictions. ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chip in 2025, The Information reported, citing internal sources. If ByteDance does this, it will become one of the world's largest owners of NVIDIA chips, despite US efforts to restrict Chinese companies from purchasing such US-made AI chips. In 2022, the United States announced export restrictions on certain types of AI chips to countries including China, where ByteDance is headquartered. These restrictions have since been tightened many times. According to a report in The Information, ByteDance…

The U.S. Treasury Department told lawmakers in a letter Monday that it suffered a cyberattack in early December that it blamed on hackers from the Chinese government. In a letter shared with senior members of the U.S. House of Representatives and seen by TechCrunch, the Treasury Department said the hackers gained remote access to certain workstations of Treasury Department employees and accessed unclassified documents, calling it a “critical It is called a “cybersecurity incident.” The Treasury Department reported on December 8 from BeyondTrust, a company that provides identity access and remote support technology to large organizations and government agencies, that…

While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI. While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as budgets remained constrained and AI tech often remained in the “experimental” category. Will that all start to change in 2025? Depends on who you ask. TechCrunch talked to 20 venture capitalists who back startups looking to sell to enterprises about their predictions for 2025. They…

Volkswagen Group's troubled automotive software arm Cariad has been releasing terabytes of customer data on around 800,000 Audi, SEAT, Skoda and Volkswagen electric cars onto the internet for several months, Der Spiegel reports. I left it on [in German]He quoted a security researcher who learned about the data breach from an anonymous whistleblower. Researchers speaking at the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, Germany this week said the published data also includes the exact location coordinates of more than half of the vehicles on the list, some 460,000. He said that Some of the location data is accurate to a few…

Encode, the nonprofit that co-sponsored California's ill-fated AI safety law SB 1047, seeks permission to file a court brief in support of Elon Musk's injunction to block OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company. Ta. In a draft brief filed Friday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Encode's lawyers said OpenAI's transformation into a for-profit company would undermine the company's mission to “develop and deploy innovative technology.” He said it would be “damaging.” It is safe and beneficial to the public. ” “OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman claim to be developing technology that will…

Bench, the venture capital-backed accounting startup that abruptly shut down last week, leaving thousands of customers locked out of their accounts, will be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal. was obtained exclusively by TechCrunch. San Francisco-based HR technology company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax. Matt Charney, Employer.com's chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch that the company is bringing back the Bench platform and providing instructions for customers to quickly log in and retrieve their data. Charney told TechCrunch that customers will have the option of…

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that helps manage and optimize AI hardware infrastructure. As part of the merger, Run:ai said its software, which currently only works on Nvidia products, will be open sourced, meaning Nvidia rivals such as AMD and Intel can also adapt it to their own hardware. said to mean. “We are eager to build on our gains to date, expand our talented team, and expand our product and market reach,” Run:ai told Bloomberg in a statement. “Open sourcing the software allows us to extend its availability to the entire AI ecosystem.” Nvidia…